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Session 1 – Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator, Welcome, and Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part I Takeaways: Starting a company requires: an idea, a product, a team and execution. Don’t start a company unless you feel compelled by a particular problem and want to solve it. It is easier to make money by joining an established later stage start-up. It is easier to make new features happen in an existing company. Start the company if you really feel the need to start it for an idea that you really love. Startup Ideas: Expect to spend 10 years building your company, so spend considerable time up front thinking it through. Be mission oriented so your employees can get behind an important mission. You need conviction in your beliefs and the ability to ignore naysayers (there will be many). It’s okay to sound crazy, if you’re right. Focus on something you yourself need – otherwise you need to get very close to your customers to understand how your product meets their needs. Develop a clearly articulated 1 sentence vision – if you can’t summarize it like that, it is too complicated. Your company idea will probably sound crazy. All of the successful companies do, because they need to have the long-term scope, and if they didn’t sound crazy an existing company would already be doing it. Focus on ideas that can turn into a monopoly – a derivative idea is harder to protect. Know your market and focus on markets that will be big in 10 years (though may be small or nonexistent now). Remember that a small but rapidly growing market probably has customers who are desperate for a solution, and will put up with an imperfect but rapidly improving product. Think first of the market and demand – from there, create the supply. Products: Make a great product. Build something a small number of users or customers LOVE and then build from there. If those early users love your product, they will create organic growth for you. Listen to what your users want in the product. Get as much feedback as possible – what do they like? What would they pay for? Would they recommend the product to others? This feedback will drive your product decisions. Develop your key metrics which will drive your growth. Dustin Moskovitz, Cofounder, Facebook, Cofounder, Asana, Cofounder, Good Ventures, Why to Start a Startup Takeaways: Starting a company is hard work (you will spend ALL of your time working on it), stressful (you make the decisions, people depend on you for their livelihood or left behind real jobs because they believed in you), and you are always on call. You are more committed to stay at your startup than if you were working for someone else – it’s bad form to leave less than five years after starting. You are a role model every day you walk in the door – your employees will respond to what you bring to the table – good or bad. Financial reward is correlated with the impact you have on people. But as a founder, you should not be retaining more than 10% of the equity or you have not sufficiently rewarded others. Start a company if “you can’t not do it” – meaning, you have the passion for the product or service you are building and you have the aptitude to get it done (the world needs you to do it).